Of all the stars thrown up by the pop explosion of the Sixties, none has exerted as deep or lasting an influence on our culture as Bob Dylan. Others may have been prettier, or sold more records, or made a smoother transition into today’s gossip-column celebrocracy, but none has so irreversibly altered our conception of what is possible within a popular song, and particularly within its lyrics. He was pop’s great emancipator: from Hendrix to the Beatles, Clapton to Cohen, Beach Boys to Beck, virtually all of rock music has been inspired or influenced in some way by Dylan’s creative ambition. It’s testament to that ambition that, almost four decades on from his recording debut, Bob Dylan remains a restless, quixotic figure, heedless of musical trends, exasperatingly uneven, but still capable of stunning work like 1997’s Time Out Of Mind.
But whatever the merits (or otherwise) of his subsequent work, and notwithstanding in particular the greatness of Blood On The Tracks, it’s upon his sixties songs that Bob Dylan’s reputation ultimately rests: that extraordinary sequence of records which unerringly tracked the tenor of the times as he moved through his various incarnations as raw young folkie, prince of protest, folk-rock innovator, symbolist rocker and country-rock pioneer.
Dylan’s progress through that decade is a trail which constituted the primary motor for my own development, as it did for so many others; yet to a younger generation his position grows progressively less clear, more vague and blurred—possibly because of his constant creative flux, but also, I think, simply as a result of the accelerating erosion of knowledge which seems to accompany our supposed ‘information society.’ A case in point: in a weekly British music paper recently, the guitarist with a highly successful American post-grunge rock band—we’ll call him James—cited Dylan’s ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’ as one of his favorite songs. Fine, except that he erroneously claimed it was a fictional story—and one which, furthermore, was apparently issued on an album called Don’t Look Back. Which doesn’t exist.
This book is basically to help people like James. In it, I’ve tried to give some idea of the forces—musical, political, historical, literary, philosophical and personal—at play in each of Dylan’s songs through this period of his greatest achievement, along with brief accounts of their recording, where appropriate. For research material, I consulted much of the available trove of Dylan literature, of which the most useful were the three classic biographies—Anthony Scaduto’s no-nonsense Bob Dylan, Bob Spitz’s iconoclastic Dylan: A Biography, and Robert Shelton’s exhaustively detailed No Direction Home—all of which proved fascinating funds of information.
Dylan’s own Lyrics 1962–1985 sparked as many questions as it provided answers, and Craig McGregor’s excellent compilation Bob Dylan: A Retrospective contained a wealth of contemporary essays and interviews. Two other compilations, All Across The Telegraph (ed. Michael Gray and John Bauldie) and The Dylan Companion (ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman), offered stimulating blends of opinion and explication. Other books consulted include Levon Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire; Greil Marcus’s examination of The Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic; Clinton Heylin’s account of Dylan’s recording sessions, Dylan Behind Closed Doors; and Tim Riley’s Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. On more general social and political matters, the following were helpful: Hugh Brogan’s Kennedy; Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg’s The Growth Of The American Republic, and David Steigerwald’s The Sixties And The End Of Modern America.
I’ve also drawn on interviews I conducted at various times with Joan Baez, Don Pennebaker, Sam Lay, Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper; I am particularly indebted to Robbie and Al for their time and generosity. I’d also like to thank my editors at The Independent, Q, Mojo and the NME—in whose pages various of the opinions contained herein were originally ventilated in one form or another—particularly Neil Spencer, Mark Ellen, Giles Smith, Nick Coleman and Mat Snow.
Other friends, colleagues and musicians who have directly contributed to my greater understanding of Dylan throughout the years, or who have helped this project in some other way, include—first and foremost—the late John Bauldie, who helped re-ignite my dormant interest; and also Phil Barnes, Pete Bennion, Jackson Browne, Paul Du Noyer, Barry Everard, Patrick Humphries, Daniel Lanois, Jared Levine, Roger Longmore, Phil Manzanera, Gavin Martin, Rainer Ptacek, Leon Russell, Patrick Smith, Paul Trynka, Don & David Was, Lucian Randall at Carlton Books, and most of all, the lovely Linda, who kept me sane enough to finish it. My love goes out to all of them, and to each and every underdog in the whole wide Universe.
ANDY GILL